5 Ways You Can Stand Out as an Early-Career Software Engineer
I’m going to tell you the five things I wish I had known when I began my career.
I’ve had a very successful career. But that success was determined by inches not yards. You need every competitive advantage you can muster in order to consistently make it to the next level.
Now, let’s dive in.
Learn the Business
You only exist to deliver business value.
Want to know the secret of getting any technical initiative funded in nearly any enterprise? Draw a straight line from the outcome of your initiative to business value. Get good at this, and you’ll rarely need to worry about budgets.
Learn the Org Chart
People and power relationships rule everything around you.
There are two directions of change in an organization: bottom-up and top-down. Even though it’s not optimal, you can drive technology changes without support from the bottom. You will never drive change without support from the top.
Learn How Your Organization Runs Projects/Products
You need to understand how the machine works.
Your organization runs like a machine. That machine has an operating system (policies & procedures). It has bugs. It has performance bottlenecks. Like a reliable program, you must learn to execute with mechanical sympathy.
Learn How Your Organization Measures Quality
You need to know what success looks like.
All around you, people are keeping score. Test coverage. Service Level Objectives. Objectives & Key Results. Key Performance Indicators. Some of these matter, some of them don’t, and all of them are gamed.
Learn to Effectively Communicate These Lessons to Your Peers
You ought to send the elevator back down.
There are two types of people with these skills: those with a scarcity mindset, and those with an abundance mindset. You can step over your peers, or you can bring them with you. Who do you want to be?
Don’t Hate the Player. Hate the Game.
I know none of these have anything to do with making a computer wiggle as you feed it instructions. But more often than not, I’ve watched the less accomplished programmer who has these skills advance to the chagrin of the 10X developer who doesn’t. May those outcomes be ever in your favor.
